The GlobalSoilMap: Basis of the global spatial soil information system captures the work conducted by the Digital Soil Mapping and soil science community that was presented during the first GlobalSoilMap Conference in Orleans, France from 7–9 Oct. 2013. The GlobalSoilMap (GSM) Project originated in 2006 in response to new demands for accurate, high-resolution and consistent soil information across the globe to aid the (i) land management decisions at field or catchment scales, (ii) modeling community, and (iii) policymakers to ensure a sustainable use of soil resources (Sanchez et al., 2009). With support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the GSM consortium was established with the main goal of producing high-resolution, continuous soil property maps for major soil properties, for standard depths up to 2 m, for the entire globe with uncertainty estimates and freely available via web based infrastructure (Hempel et al., 2013). The GSM overall approach consists of three main components: (i) digital soil mapping, (ii) soil management recommendations, and (iii) supported by a robust cyberinfrastructure for the end users. The book includes 77 papers according to the overall approach of the GSM project. Three introductory papers provide a brief overview of the GSM history and technical specifications for the production of the final gridded soil property maps. Especially noteworthy is the paper by McKenzie on the Pillar four of the Global Soil Partnership Initiative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and its direct implications for the potential of GSM to play a major role in assembling and delivering free and high-resolution soil information worldwide. A selected number of papers in the Nodes, countries and case study reports section offers insights into the efforts and progress made at continental (nodes) and country levels through numerous case studies. The Methodology section provides a more detailed account of approaches and methods employed to generate the gridded soil property maps. Examples cover a wide range of topics, from the impact of various map scales on property predictions to issues related to generating continuous gridded soil property maps from discrete soil polygon legacy data. Numerous case studies focus on soil properties such as soil depth, particle size, soil organic carbon, soil bulk density, and available soil water capacity and illustrate some of the approaches and solutions to overcome these challenges. One of the unique contributions of the book is the Uncertainty section. For the first time in soil survey history, the Book Review